


this is NOT an alien friendly zone!!!

by suitablyskippy



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Slice of Life, with cameos from bec and baby jake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:59:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world is coming, and it looks more inviting from certain universes than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deer/gifts).



The sky’s a lurid purple and the pines are black and weird against it the night you get your baby. You’re squatting behind your four-by-four, parked up on an offroad embankment and ankle-deep in mud: you’ve got your rifle propped in one hand and your pants hooked back in the other. The Batterwitch’s wrath comes down strongest when your business tricks come up wiliest, and you haven’t stopped to pee since you started running, and you started running as soon as your latest lie-packed press release went public – profits rocketing! FTSE value through the roof! talk of collaboration with Apple for expansions in the entertainment sector! most successful business year to date! Yesterday you shot out the tires of a truck in the middle of rush hour in Chicago, one hand on the wheel and the other on your blowpipe, head out the window and jeep swerving wildly through the traffic as the assassin in the truck unequipped his gunkind and looked guileless just in time for the press photographers to swoop. 

You rest your forehead on your propped-up rifle. Mosquitoes drone dizzily past in the twilight. fuck off!!! you whisper, but they don’t. You shimmy your pants back up without wiping and bullfrogs shriek from the shadows – you’ve got cans, you’ve got a cookalizer, another day non-stop will be no trouble. 

The roof of your jeep is washed in sudden, fiery light. 

You hitch your rifle straight to your shoulder and squint up, into the concentric afterimages left glowing on your vision: there’s something coming. 

You shove your way forwards, through the scratchy webs of low thin branches. There’s something coming, out of the sky, and you’re gonna get there first. You stumble on a log and furiously cuss it, grit your teeth and bludgeon your way straight through a low-lying thornbush with the butt of your rifle. The dark forest begins to shimmer a pale white and the hallucinatory way the shadows fall and flicker through the underbrush sets you off your balance; a dull tremor in the ground below your sneakers builds up and up till it’s a sound as much as a feeling but by the time you realize it’s hard to separate the two, a low roar thrumming through you that’s loud enough to deafen. 

You skid into a clearing that glows and crackles orange from one toweringly claustrophobic pine wall to the other. You’re spattered in leaf mulch to your knees and you’re scratched up everywhere you’re bare, but you’ve only got eyes for the sky. 

The trees are shaking. Your bones itch from the vibrations. 

You press your hands to your ears and you watch the meteor come in. 

\---

[SUBMIT. CONSUME. EMBRACE YOUR CULLING.] 

\---

You pick your way across splintered tree trunks to the edge of the crater, jagged in the low light from the last of the fires. The path back to your jeep is entirely clear, pulverized down to ragged-edged stumps and settling ash, silvery under the fat bright moon. 

hello?? you call. The fire crackles on. aliens can come out with their hands all the fucking way up please, this is NOT an alien friendly zone 

In the deep shadow at the lip of the crater, something moves. 

You drop to your knee and line your sights against it. 

It keeps moving. 

im armed and dangerous!!!!!! 

It’s moving towards you, low to the ground and utterly unflappable. 

You hold your breath. 

Hrrummm, it says, and gurgles, cheerfully. 

uhhhh............... 

Hrrumkh, says the baby. You sling your rifle across your back and scoop it up. The baby has mildly singed hair and is wearing glasses and a diaper, and you hold it dubiously out, at safe arms’ length, just in case those teeth are meant for fighting. 

did you just come down with that meteor?? 

Firelight glimmers on the ridiculous baby spectacles. Ahahahehehe, says the baby, and burps on you. 

thats not an answer kiddo! im not in a position any more where i can just trust every baby that falls out the sky at me – im gonna need some explanations

You check inside the diaper. The baby winks. 

omg you did not just wink at me

He winks at you again. 

you little squirt :O

Your SkaiaNet Monopoly Modus (Business Upgrade) tends to render living beings dead within thirty seconds of captchaloguing, so you file your rifle back into your strife deck and hitch the baby onto your hip: he squirms obnoxiously the whole way back to your jeep, coating you in soot and forest dirt in all the places you weren’t already coated as you trudge through the wreckage of the forest. You’ve got a scanner in the trunk: CrockerCorp’s never built an android yet that could fool you. 

You tie him into the front seat with the spare rope you keep in the footwell for emergency abseiling, jam down the accelerator, and swerve into reverse with your arm flung over the headrest behind you as you check the road is clear: which it is, and deserted in the moonlight.


	2. Chapter 2

You sneak into the house behind Bec, your hand wound tight into his ruff, your hair swinging heavy and sand-matted against your back from a morning spent making sand angels on the shore. The pad of his paws echoes in the dark and wood-lined hall as you navigate your way between the globes of the world your granddad keeps it stocked with, and he pants enthusiastically, tongue lolling. Your skin is gritty with salt and you’re buzzing with a pleasant dull warmth, even in the deep shadows of your old and gloomy house; you have sun lotion smeared on your glasses. 

HRRMF, says Bec, with a doggy cough. 

sssssh!!! 

HRRRRMF, he says again, and swishes his tail stubbornly against your bare shins. 

that is soooo not what ssh means bec!! 

BARK. 

omg that was NOT NECESSARY

The fireplace ROARS and your grandpa looms up, blunderbuss in hand and ready to strife! 

Firelight skips merrily over the blank faces of your floppy, inanimate houseguests, arrayed on the sofas in their formal attire. You glower at your grandpa and he stares impassively back, gaze glassy and glinting behind his old square specs. The tension in the room is mounting by the moment. 

You release Bec. 

He lumbers a little way away, batting his tail against the stuffy old globes; a few creak reluctantly, dustily into motion. get my back, you tell him. You don’t take your eyes off your grandpa. 

BARK, says Bec. 

damn straight!!! ;) 

You equip your rifle and boost it to your shoulder and you take aim and you FIRE!

pew pew pew pew

Chunks of plaster shatter from the wall and the mantelpiece and the ceiling’s frivolously twiddly cornices. Your strife mode is unconventional! You don’t shoot to kill but to scare, and you scare with _flair_ –

pew pew pew pew pew pew pew

– upside down! from the windowsill! you knock off his silly adventurers hat and blast at the chandelier while pirouetting lightly from the top of his head! somersaulting backwards! crouching in the lap of the floppy-legged mummy on the sofa, the pockmarked wall behind your grandpa raining flakes of paint and stone – 

eat hot lead, grandpops!!! 

BARK, says Bec. 

You pause, bristly carpet scraping your knees. Your granddad’s eyes flicker glassy orange behind his lenses and you meet his gaze, muse for a moment. 

you think? :S

BARK BARK. 

bluh, fiiiiiine

The firelight on the steel frontpiece of the doll your grandpa did up like a knight dances bright and blazing, and you file your rifle back to your specibus with a _pop_. Your grandpa keeps his blunderbuss out, but after all, your grandpa is dead – you have to make some allowances for him, strife-wise!

Bec licks at the sandy sole of your foot. You hop back up and pet him – ruffle the thick and oily fur of his ruff, scruff back his ears, nuzzle your nose down against his and awkwardly wipe your foot dry on the sofa – and you launch yourself forwards for an armful of granddad. 

love you grandy!!!! 

You can’t squeeze as hard as you’d like in case the fraying stitches down his sides leak any more of his stuffing, but he smells comforting, like old leather and formaldehyde. 

HRRRMF, says Bec, and damply smears his nose into the crook of your knee. 

um EXCUSE ME bec i am kind of having a moment here?? :/ 

HRRRRMF, he says again. 

give me a minute you silly dog, ill get you lunch when im 

You crumple and your head smacks the placronym on the plinth at your grandpa’s feet and your glasses shatter and you slide down onto the carpet, sprawled out in the crackling orange light of the fire. zzzzzzzzzzz, you say. 

Upstairs, your dreambot whirs awake – and, with a celebratory unfurling of her neatly riveted arms, promptly upends the flowerpots arranged decoratively around her charging dock. You’d stop arranging flowerpots decoratively around her charging dock, but you feel it’s far more important to keep your surroundings beautiful than it is to fuss over a spot of spilled soil every now and again. 

She glides out through the conservatory; and gently, you snore on.


	3. Chapter 3

You wrench the wheel to the right and skid off onto a narrow side road fringed with dead ploughed field: stone skitters up across the hood and you leap out and slam the door. The highway is deserted and you cross it jogging, a pale blue fleece pulled over the same SkaiaNet logo shirt you’ve been wearing for the last five days, cicadas shrilling back and forth across the road in the low pink twilight as your shadow stretches out. 

A single blue tube of neon looped to read WELCOME flickers on and off at the entrance of the grey and grimy Halifax Roadside Motel. You cross the parking lot to the alley at its side and you jump and swing and heave yourself up, onto the lowest platform of the fire escape. Old twists of pain flare up down your bones: you set your teeth and clear your mind, and it’s very nearly almost no trouble at all to wiggle your way up the ladders to the roof. 

The steel rungs are warm to the touch; by the third floor, you can see beyond the motel to the sludgy river at its back. On the roof there’s a door to the elevator shaft: the chainlink fence around it casts shadows shaped like diamonds in the salmon-streaked light. 

You equip your pliers and a tasteful set of pocket-sized grenades, and you get to work. 

\---

[OBEY. CONFORM. CEASE REPRODUCTION.] 

\---

You jog back to the jeep and yank the rear door open. Jake is chewing absently on one of your empty gun cartridges. up you get buster!!!!! you say, and you scoop him into the rucksack you’ve been using for baby transportation. You let him keep the cartridge. You suspect he may be teething, despite the fact his front teeth have been overdeveloped since the moment he hit Earth. 

You press your hand to the smeared glass pane of the revolving door as you pass through it. 

room for one please, you tell the scraggle-bearded boy at the front desk, and oh shit im all butterfingers today!!! You scrabble for the change you’ve let drop and you give the desk a good patting-down while you’re at it. 

Waiting for the elevator to your room you lean your hand on the wall and yawn, study the dusty geometric-patterned carpet, count down from thirty-five till there’s a squeal and a crunch and the shrill scrape of metal on reluctant metal and the boy at the desk leaps up with a what the fuck!! and a fire extinguisher. 

just a disrotated crankshaft maximizer by the sounds of it! you say, helpfully, and entirely untruthfully, and as you make your way up the stairs to your room you’re sure to press your hand to every pillar you pass as you swing up and onto the next flight, Jake in the backpack babbling in your ear. 

The room is small and square and parallelograms of dim light shift across the carpet as the curtains move in the evening breeze. You set your baby down in the middle of the bed. Gummer, he says. 

grandma, you correct. 

;) 

*rolls eyes*

You equip your dogtop: settle the hard plastic helmet down over your hair, slot in your glasses, twiddle the fake-furred left ear till you pick up signal and the right till you’ve recalibrated your projection parameters. Its filters turn your world crisp and particulated and up to two hundred times more zoomable, optically and aurally and optionally olfactorily, and you peel up the edge of one rosy curtain and scour the blank stretch of evening highway. There’s a dead skunk on the edge of the road. Infrared tells you it’s still warm: there’s been traffic in the last hour. You're clear.

activate, you say. 

The sensors you plastered across the motel’s walls and doors flip invisibly on: projections flare out from the whiskers of your helmet, glimmering translucent green. There’s the kid at the desk – you frame his image with your hands and _pull_ , and the view soars in so close you can see the scruff of hair on his chin wisping back and forth as he breathes. There’s the third floor stairwell, there’s the parking lot as seen from the roof, there’s the road from the windscreen of your jeep – you move through the room and push and pull and you examine every angle, green light washing over the furniture as projections shift and pass through them. 

the elevator was theirs but the elevator has mysteriously exploded, you tell Jake. all the kitchen equipment except for the cutlery and the freezer is ours too. Another red blip appears on the image you’re studying. no scratch that, theyve also got a crockercorp whisk. but all the electronics are ours and what do we say about that??? 

Mmm fush. Fushh. 

we say thats the MOST IMPORTANT FUCKING BIT. You zoom in tighter and tighter till one whole screen is filled with the SkaiaNet atom, etched onto the thermalizer control panel in the foyer.  fishy alien tendrils always ALWAYS reach farther than you think they can. its a tough lesson to learn but lessons dont stick unless theyre tough!! 

Fwushhhh, he says, gleefully, and you deactivate your dogtop the instant you realize he’s farted: accidentally activating 200x olfactory magnification with a baby in the room was an experience you only needed once to know you’d never do it again. 

and if you ever do forget it, you say, then she just reteaches you the hard way 

You rig up laser beams pulsing red and alarmed across the hotel room door and before you hit the lights you get news of a failed assassination attempts on a robot double back at base, and your baby goes the night without crapping himself and crying about it; and you still don’t sleep. Sometimes you think about how it’s been no time at all since you stacked your sylladex with fruit and tins and long-sleeved sweaters and ran for it: but mostly, you try not to!


	4. Chapter 4

aaaaughk!! 

You spin and squint and boot your rifle into position and fire, and the largest of your uncannily sentient Venus flytrap/tanglebuddy crossbreeds keels halfway and hangs drooping, a bullet through the center of its fat waxy face. The key lime it was chowing down on springs free and vaults straight over the side of the plantpot to wiggle free on the floor, and the tangletraps shriek, indignantly, snapping their mouths and squirming their tentacles towards you. You twirl your rifle like a cheerleader’s baton and flip it up and over your shoulder, straight back into its strife card. 

you have to get up earlier than that to fool me buddy!! 

You high five your deactivated dreambot: you’re sure if that you and she were ever simultaneously conscious, the first thing you’d do would be congratulate each other on your sweet and styling moves. 

You’re sitting on a worktop in your greenhouse, a screwdriver tucked behind your ear, your dreambot motionless between your legs with her arms upraised and the panels of her head unscrewed. Coils of wire spill out over her forehead and curls of ivy tumble down from the hanging baskets around you: the whole thing is cheeringly symmetrical, and you rummage down the smooth insides of her steel skull for the memory card, singing along to your music-o-tron propped on the counter beside you. 

_if you wanna be my lover_   
_you have got to give give give give_   
_give it to me baby oo sock it to me sock it to me_

du-duhhh duh..... you can brush my hair... duh-duhhh anyWHEEERE....... 

The brassy yellow dream viewer your grandpa built you pops from your sylladex and hits the tiles with a thud, squat and sturdy with a wide square screen: you slot in the card and its lights blip on. Clear midday light casts sharp shadows below the rows of gleaming steel plant troughs; the glare hits your dreambot’s casing when you shift towards your viewer and you shade your eyes for a moment, dazzled. 

==> PLAY

You tap the command. It blinks green, and the dreamlog startles on. 

Onscreen the view lurches suddenly, vertiginously, from lying to standing: a flash of shining stone, a sky in blinding white. Absently, you tap your screwdriver to your lips, watching the ascent of your 'bot to the clouds. 

The first wisps brush by her optic system, soft and pearlescent and utterly unlike the turbulent purple stormheads you’re used to in the rainy season. Something in the murk reminds you, a glimpse of blue – of course, you remember now, you don’t know how you forgot! Next week, while swimming, you’re going to have a run-in with a jellyfish, but you’re going to clobber it into submission before it tries to start anything. beating up a jellyfish, you say, thoughtfully, and to your side your lunchtop starts transcribing. maybe break off a curtain pole so ive got some good heavy weaponry ready on my side??? 

The thermostat ticks over to its 2pm setting, which is slightly cooler with an increase in Breeze, Humor, and Musicality. 

omg, you say, peering closely at the dream viewer, im going to wrestle a bear.  The vision shifts and tilts. oh crap delete that!!!! thats not a bear its a DUVET, uh i guess im gonna fall off my bed sometime soon? 

Behind you – chin in hands and bare feet kicking – the leaves of your tropicana trees rustle in the wind as air jets activate, a gentle draft of fresh breeze piped straight in from outside. The chimes strung up in their branches tinkle quietly; the mandarin oranges on the potted bushes around them squirm in excitement, and an adonis apple launches itself from the shrubbery to bounce across the floor in violent glee. You like to program in some relaxation time for your garden at least twice a day, and your plants go absolutely wild for music that isn’t mixed by Dave!

skipper plumbthroat has a wacky adventure in a hot air balloon, you say, and you sigh. You really don’t think it’s fair play for your future-dreams to be full of spoilers. 

Spokes of light cut through the glossy creepers on the conservatory’s east side, hanging in great droops between the pillars, but the cloud onscreen is dark and you frown down – a yellow tie on your left thumb? a navy one on the second knuckle of your right pinky? there’s a hairtie round your wrist that sure wasn’t there when you passed out! The clouds grow foggy, and you still just can’t remember for the life of you what it means. One metallic hand darts into view as your dreamself cranes out the window, and you give your glasses a quick polish on your sandy, dog-slobbered t-shirt before craning right in too. 

beeeeeeep. 

oh bec!! for gods sake :O

HRRRUF, says Bec, and blitzes back out of existence with a quick lick to your knee. You spin your lunchtop round but he hasn’t crashed it, like you suspected: you’ve got a chatlog open you don’t remember starting and a stream of purple messages you don’t remember reading. You scroll up. 

GG: rose is it new york that has the big statue of a lady in a spiky hat?? 

TT: If by ‘lady in a spiky hat’ you mean the Statue of Liberty, then yes, you are correct. 

GG: omg no way really?? 

TT: Really, truly, indubitably so.   
TT: Why the sudden interest in globally iconic statuary? 

GG: ok well i guess new york is going to burn down soon!! 

TT: Excuse me? 

GG: lol d/w rose, we all are gonna be ok :p  
GG: im not too sure of the details yet but its going to be the most fantastic adventure!!!!! 

TT: Jade, 

\-- GG is offline! --

oh noooo poor rose :( ive told you to stay off the computer a MILLION TIMES, you scold your dreambot, but her big red eyelamps gaze vacantly upwards. Oh, you can never hold a thing against her, not with a puppy-dog stare like that one! Your dream-memory is coming back to you now, fire in the sky and cratered city streets, skyscrapers snapped off halfway down and a sweet ballooning feeling of joy. 

\-- GG is online! --

TT: A half hour pause after an assertion like that seemed a little melodramatic, even to me.   
TT: Although, of course, I bow to your superior grasp of the practice.   
TT: No one wields ellipsiskind quite like you do. 

GG: sorry rose i was asleep!!!! im awake now though and 100x less goofy, hehe :D

TT: Yes, of course. The observable reduction in goofiness was certainly the first thing I noticed in that message. 

GG: look i just wanted to let you know! because i say some really dumb stuff when im sleeping sometimes  
GG: yes the world might catch fire a bit! there might be a bit of stuff that looks sort of apocalypse-y or whatever  
GG: but if you stick with me well all be a-ok!!!!! 

TT: ... Were I given to belief in your patently ridiculous sleep visions, this reassurance would do nothing to reassure. 

GG: but you dont believe in my dreams though do you!! ;) 

TT: Naturally I do not. 

GG: naturally ;) ;)   
GG: *wink!!!!!* 

TT: But I will admit to finding a certain level of comfort in your Cassandraic babbling.   
TT: A note of melodic insanity amidst the otherwise monotonic tedium of my daily life. So,   
TT: Thank you. 

You snort with laughter, already tapping out at the glimmering air above your lap where your keyboard’s projecting. 

GG: rose its going to be the best apocalypse the world has ever seen!! and you can hold me to that ;) 


	5. Chapter 5

Your baby’s hooting in the backseat, snuggled up with a dead possum you threw in your SkaiaNet Portable Sterilizator the minute it became clear he was too attached to leave it on the roadside where you found it. You’re stretched out in the front seats, boots kicked up on the passenger side dashboard and hair wound up into a straggled grey bun, your earpiece in and your voice down low: the wind rattles through the pipes of the jeep and leaves in blazing orange whip against the windscreen, swirling and churning in a late fall storm. 

i got ninety nine problem and that bitch is all of them, you mutter, and your message encrypts and recrypts and decrypts and moments later there’s a laugh at the other end and her voice echoes back, tinny and stifled: 

You seem entangled in girl problems; and it’s unquestionable fact that I feel bad for you, son. 

dont even TALK to me about girl problems lalonde

Destruction of a universe, mindwipe of a civilization, ruthless undercutting of an otherwise entirely affordable range of bathroom suite furnishings.   
I’ve written to Cosmo, but as yet they’ve no advice to offer us. 

Your staff don’t know you’re running but your allies do, and where the two coincide you’re making arrangements for the future. 

\---

One night you wrap yourself in a fleecy Manthro Chaps blanket, and you settle down in a grassy clearing on the mountainside and livestream the sunset to your friends. Bec curls up warm and heavy beside you, his tail whisking idly across your knees; from his breathing you think he might be napping, but it’s awfully hard to tell sometimes, given he doesn’t have eyes to shut. 

The projection from your lunchtop flickers grainily in the darkening sky before you, and the sea reflects a vivid blood red all the way to the horizon. 

EB: jade, holy shit, i am pretty sure nature is not meant to look that terrifying even if you DO live on a completely ridiculous island in the middle of nowhere. 

TG: fucking hell youre a woman of steel to face this doomsday vision every night without shitting your pants   
TG: (if youre currently shitting your pants dont tell me pls i wanna live in ignorance) 

TT: I must say, I never realized quite how far down the gaping maw of Armageddon your island was situated until now. 

GG: told you so!!! 

A cacophony of infuriated voices bursts from your speakers, and you laugh, and you snuggle down into Bec, and you wake up several hours later as the dawn’s smearing up across the sky in a kind of pale and anxious pink, and your friends are still there and still talking and when you explain that you didn’t mean to fall asleep they complain and they tease you, and you think about how you’re all gonna be together soon and you squeeze Bec so hard he disappears in protest for a moment. sorry buddy, you say, and he nuzzles your nose with his in forgiveness. 

You love your island, but you sure can’t wait for the world to end!

**Author's Note:**

> now with gorgeous art [here](http://toomuchpressure.tumblr.com/post/40755681767/desertmint-you-hitch-your-rifle-straight-to) and [here](http://toomuchpressure.tumblr.com/post/40790591890/desertmint-the-baby-has-mildly-singed-hair) by [tumblr user desertmint](http://desertmint.tumblr.com)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I have to go get on her case for needless theatrics.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/721286) by [bramblePatch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch)




End file.
